Way back on March 3 this year, BlackBerry President for Devices and Emerging Solutions Ron Louks appeared on staged at MWC and briefly showed off an upcoming Slider smartphone.
While BlackBerry have kept silent on the the device, a little more information was provided by Sunil Lalvani, managing director at BlackBerry India (at the time). He stated that BlackBerry will launch its slider smartphone in India towards the end of the ongoing financial year targeting the mid to high handset market.
Since then, the rumors of an Android smartphone have swept the interwebs and according to the report showing the picture, the slider will be running Android 5.1 (Lollipop).
Of course, BlackBerry producing a pure Android smartphone would be a great thing and while it hasn’t done anything to improve the sliding stock ($7.61 at time of publishing), it is certainly generating a lot of interest media wise.
I’m not going to provide my thoughts on an Android smartphone here as I have already covered it when I wrote “Could BlackBerry produce an Android smartphone?“, earlier in the week.
What is clear is that users are getting confused between what BlackBerry are doing in the Enterprise with Android and an Android smartphone.  It has reached the point where a lack of understanding has led to old news being reported as new and regurgigated by other sites.
With nothing more than a render of an alleged smartphone to go on, it’s time for the blurry pictures to start leaking. The first “alleged” leaked photos of the “BlackBerry Venice” show a phone with an edged screen like the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge. Where the device hugely differs of course is it has a sliding QWERTY keyboard installed just below the capacitive touchscreen.
One huge difference between the dubious render and the leaked picture is the inclusion of the BBM icon, something that no BlackBerry device (or BlackBerry produced render) would omit.
The Venice is rumored to have a 5.4 inch display screen, with sloped screen on both ends, just as is the case with the S6 edge, and bring the second generation of the Snapdragon 810 chipset.
Taking into consideration that the alleged picture is supposedly running Android, I would take it with a huge pinch of salt.  Genuine or not? You be the judge!
While there has been so much wrong information spat out about BlackBerry’s Android smartphone, there is no doubt this blurry image will be the first of many more to come and the Android smartphone will contine to generate a lot of interest.
